The Heart Behind Liberty BASIC

 As the creator of Liberty BASIC, I want to share the story behind this programming language, a project born out of my passion for making programming accessible, fun, and wondrous for everyone.  My journey in the realm of coding began with the magical experience of BASIC, a language that opened the doors to the world of software creation for me. I want to bring that same sense of excitement and possibility to others through Liberty BASIC.

What makes this especially inspiring I think is that Liberty BASIC was originally meant to be a programming game, where the player programmed robots in BASIC.

Bringing Back the Magic of BASIC

When I realized that the BASIC I was writing for the robot game would become a real programming tool, I decided to go for it!  My idea for Liberty BASIC was to recapture the spirit of the early days of BASIC. BASIC was the gateway for many into programming. It was simple, inviting, and allowed immediate interaction and results. My vision was to reignite that spark of wonder, making programming as much fun as it was for me when I first started.

Simplicity and Approachability

At the heart of Liberty BASIC lies its simplicity and approachability. The language is designed to be easy to learn and use, especially for those who are new to programming. It’s like giving someone a set of simple, intuitive tools to start building their dream projects right away.

Fun and Immediate Results

One of the unique features of Liberty BASIC is how it makes programming fun. I believe in the power of seeing your work come to life quickly. Beginners should be able to write a few lines of code and immediately see a window pop up, a graphic drawn, or a simple game come to life. This immediate feedback is not just rewarding; it's crucial in maintaining enthusiasm and interest in learning.

Liberty BASIC vs. Other Languages

While other languages like Python and JavaScript are powerful and versatile, they can be daunting for beginners.  I've always tried very hard to balance simplicity with capability. 

My Vision and Journey

My personal journey with programming has always been about the joy of creating and of learning new ways to think. With Liberty BASIC, I wanted to offer a tool that makes programming feel like an adventure, not a chore. It's been heartwarming to see people of all ages take their first steps in programming with Liberty BASIC, discovering the same joy and wonder that I found years ago.

In essence, Liberty BASIC is more than just a programming language; it's a celebration of the simplicity, fun, and wonder that programming can bring. It's been a wonderful journey that I am eager to invite others to join.

Links

        Liberty BASIC website 

        Liberty BASIC community forum  

        Liberty BASIC video playlist  

Think programming is too hard, or boring? Think again!

A couple of days ago I was at a Starbucks. I sat down around a large table to enjoy my coffee and a pastry. There were several other people there. I pulled out my iPhone to check my email. There was a fellow across from me with one of the new Macbook Air laptops, and a few minutes later a young man also sat down and pulled out a black Macbook. This concentration of Apple equipment made it easy for us to begin talking.

When it came to what sort of work we do, I shared about my business selling programming tools. I moved over to the fellow with the black Macbook and told him I wanted to show him my website so he could understand my business. When I showed him the Learn tab on the Run BASIC site and began to walk him through the examples the other people at the table came over to watch. As we went from simple "hello world!" to some easy graphics examples the reaction from onlookers was amazement! They clearly were not aware that programming could be so simple and cool. To them this was something way above them, and very dry.

What I took away from this is that people don't know that programming can be fun. They can do it, and years ago the average computer user did his own programming, in BASIC. Nowadays what gets promoted as programming is too hard, and it's no surprise that people don't want to do that. This is a misapplication of technology that makes things harder, and not easier.

We need to turn back the clock in this important area of programming.

BASIC is bad because it's too easy?

A response to a recent post read, "BASIC is good, but I think it should be avoided as a first language because it pampers the programmer too much."

I won't be the first person to say that BASIC is perfect. There is no perfect language. However, to recommend that a first language should not "pamper" the beginning programmer seems to me misses the mark completely.

I'm guessing that this means that languages should force the beginner to be aware of low level details such as the type of numeric value (int, float, byte, etc.) or that the beginner should made to manage the allocation and deallocation of memory. What do these sorts of things have to do with the essense of programming? Since there are many languages which do not have these kinds of features, I can only submit that they aren't essential to programming. Therefore they are not necessary ideas to teach the beginner.

The nitty gritty details of how a computer works ARE important. These things should be taught to any serious student of computers, but they do not need to be the first thing taught. People who do not fancy themselves experts do not need to be bothered to learn them.

Easy is the quality that BASIC has, especially in the quickness of its learnability. This is almost to a fault I agree in the sense that a slightly more general and abstract language might be a little harder to warm up to but better in the long haul. However for the person who programs for fun, or who needs a light language for writing utilities or small personal applications, I think BASIC hits the mark pretty well.

Debugging Run BASIC Web Apps

In Run BASIC's first release there is effectively no built-in debugger. Of course you can use print to log to the browser page or to a file, and this is no more or less than many other web scripting systems. We aim to do something about this in the very near future.

One of our users suggested that it would be good to create an inspector panel in Run BASIC itself and that we should add some reflection via an EVAL$() function that would allow arbitrary execution of BASIC code at runtime. We would probably also need to at least metaprogramming features like the ability to get information from the runtime like:

• The name of the current context (ie. function or subroutine)
• The names of all the variables and arrays in scope
• The source code for the current context
• A collection of objects that models the stack
• Probably more stuff

While this sort of thing is possible I think that we probably will initially provide a high level runtime inspection panel that the programmer can show and hide as needed. This is BASIC after all, and it should be as easy as possible to use. The metaprogramming stuff is cool though. ;-)

Run BASIC Tour Video Posted

One big challenge we face in explaining Run BASIC to people is that people have a preconceived notion of what an easy programming system is. Ruby on Rails is supposed to be easy, right? Easy compared to what? Java server pages? Apache and Perl? For a certain class of problems we need the kind of easy that BASIC (and I don't mean Visual Basic) has always provided.

So, today I created a 20 minute video that walks through installation, startup, and gives a tour of the features of the Run BASIC programming software and several examples. This includes creation and hosting of a simple app. Visit the Run BASIC site and check out the video and I'm sure you'll agree that you've never seen anything easier.